Our father was blind for five days. He pawed the walls as he felt his way around the house. The television stayed turned up loud, as if the chemicals that had burned his eyes had also scorched his hearing.

Largely because of a dog named Fred, who despised hats and joggers and anything that his unknowable mind deemed suspicious, Mateusz and I rented a farmhouse north of Toronto in the summer of 2010.

I grew up in a village in southern Lebanon a few years after World War II, the “Big War,” as we called it. In that place nothing came between us and the world we lived in, and in that world there was always blood, lots of it. We slaughtered the animals we ate.

I’m at my mother’s funeral, as I have often been before in dreams and waking musings, though this time she is really dead, and here I sit, an addled orphan at an age where she and I might well have just decided we would continue along together till the end.